Migrating to Exchange 2010

[stoofa]

We're currently running Exchange 2003 across 3 servers over our sites.
We are now in the process of moving over to Exchange 2010.

We've prepared AD and schema and done everything else we need to do before installation - basically we're ready to go.

Our plan being quite straight forward - introduce the Exchange 2010 server and then move all of the mailboxes from the Exchange 2003 system to the Exchange 2010.

Has anyone else done this?
What can we expect once we add our first Exchange 2010 server to an Exchange 2003 environment?
Any potential "show stoppers" where we lose email?
Will Exchange 2010 just "kill" 2003?

 

[stoofa]

We will be running servers in a DAG - we want to bring one of the servers online soon and then the second one will be added to the DAG.

Other than that the 2010 environment will initially be running "all in one".

We may expand the system as time goes on as we have sites in Sweden and the US which will also eventually be running 2010.

 

[stoofa]

We've always run Exchange on a "single server" setup.
Incomming mail has always been received by a "SendMail" server, which in turn passes things on to the Exchange server.
The Exchange server sends mail directly.
It is also the server for Webmail and also RPC over HTTPS.

We have a single Exchange 2003 server in our main UK office, Sweden and Shanghai.

The plan is to increase performance by creating a DAG of two pretty hefty servers:
2x Quad Core CPU
8GB RAM
SAS Disk array

Having a DAG should give us resilience which we haven't had before when running Exchange 2000 and then 2003.

As to if we decide to expand further and use any of the other infrastructure options of 2010 - that is something for the future.